Your Number 1 Stop For Business Resources

MBA Online Ranking

What is the MBA online ranking?

Many people have tried to rank online MBA courses but it's actually very difficult. The reason for taking an MBA online is so that you can fit it in with your life and keep on earning money. What you miss out on is the interaction with students and faculty that can make the MBA a particularly useful experience. Yet some people don't live very near a good business school or cannot get time off work or really need to combine their study with family life or work life. Yet in many people's opinions the online MBA can only ever be as good as the business school to which it is attached. The ranking of online MBAs is a topic which results in constant argument and interest.

One point to understand is that when you rank a business school online MBA course the way that you rank them only makes sense if you do so within the context of criteria that apply to you.

Some people will rank online MBAs according to the prestige and name-recognition of the business school offering them. To work this out you can find a general ranking such as the Financial Times rankings, the Economist rankings or in the states the USNews rankings. The highest ranked school in these rankings that offers an MBA online is the one that you would then put on top of the MBA online ranking.

Some people will try to rank on instructional quality. There is actually no set way of doing this, and also with the online MBA this is difficult as you receive instruction online, which could be a combination of online classes and material sent to you. The international content of the course - in terms of the case studies used, is sometimes a symptom of quality, but otherwise it may be on the amount of PhDs amongst the faculty, although that may not measure how good they will be in terms of instructional quality.

Some people choose to rank online MBAs on the delivery media and the design of the program. You could have a very prestigious school famed for the quality of their instruction, yet the interface between school and students is badly designed and thus your attention is focused too much on the actual mechanics of taking the class as opposed to the content of the class. There are no rankings on this - but you should find out how to judge it.

Rankings may not necessarily tell what is better for you. You could find a school with a higher ranking, and yet the MBA costs twice as much as a course ranked only slightly below it. A lower ranked school might also offer a specialization that you particularly want - so that is important too.